On the face of it, Sandrine’s study looked exactly as Lara remembered it: the messy, creative place of a messy, creative person. Lara had always thought of Sandrine’s brain as a buzzing fly – Restless, inquisitive – and it seemed to work at twice the speed of everyone else’s. But still…something was off.
‘You should take a look at this letter,’ said Stella, walking through.
Lara held up a hand, stopping Stella in the doorway.
‘Someone has been here.’
Back when Lara was a junior reporter, working the London crime beat for the Chronicle news desk, Lara had become friends with a Chief Inspector named Ray Banner, one of the friendly coppers at Paddington Green. Ray had been pushing sixty and heading for retirement, but she’d loved listening to his stories of being a detective during the gritty Seventies and Eighties, when old school hunches and dogged trawling was the staple of police work before the luxury of databases. Ray had drilled into Lara the importance of stepping back to look at the scene as a whole.
‘What’s on the pinboard?’ asked Lara.
Stella looked at it. ‘Well, pictures of you and Sandrine,’ she said, pointing to a photobooth strip that had been taken in their student days. There were a few other notes – the number of her dentist and the local pharmacist, some old theatre ticket stubs and a list of birthdays. ‘But apart from that, not much.’
‘Exactly,’ said Lara, leaning closer, running her fingertips over the cork. There were dozens of tiny holes in it where pins had been stuck in – and removed.
‘Sandrine used to write everything down – I mean everything,’ said Lara, thinking out loud. ‘This pinboard was always covered with stuff and she’d stick Post-it notes all over the wall too. When we lived together, I used to joke that she should buy shares in the company, because she used so many of them.’
‘That was a long time ago, Lara. Maybe she’s changed her ways. You know, put things on her computer?’
Lara shook her head. She’d been here before Christmas and there had been so many yellow Post-it notes that Lara had said her study looked like a canary’s wing.
‘Okay, so where are her notes? And where is her computer?’
She’d already spoken to Ian Fox and Jean Legard and neither of them seemed to know anything about Sandrine’s laptop.
‘Lara, this letter,’ repeated Stella, handing it to her. ‘It’s from HR at Le Figaro inviting Sandrine to an entretien préalable au licenciement, which according to Google is a preliminary meeting to discuss a potential severance. If you’re here to find a reason for Sandrine’s death, then this could be it. You said Sandrine was devoted to her job. If she was depressed and lost the thing she most cared about…?’
But Lara knew – just knew – that something else was at work here.
‘Someone has searched the apartment,’ she said decisively. ‘Can’t you see?’
Stella walked around the room silently, considering it. Five minutes earlier, Lara might have agreed that Sandrine’s job being in jeopardy might have explained a lot of things. But now it seemed obvious to her: the desk wasn’t just messy and the books, the magazines, the papers, they had all been shuffled, upended, examined.
‘So what are we going to do?’
Lara smiled gratefully. She loved how Stella trusted her judgement. Plenty would have dismissed it as clutching at straws.
‘Okay, you take the living room and kitchen. I’ll look in the bedroom, study and bathroom. We’re looking for anything that will help us build a picture of Sandrine’s final few weeks
.’
She searched her bedroom first, looking through the drawers and cupboards. She found handbags full of mints and make-up, a file of expense receipts, a box of old letters and photos from her time in London. Lara paused to smile at a picture of herself and Alex at Glastonbury, their faces painted with glitter, another of Sandrine on her graduation day – happy and proud in her black gown.
Looking in Sandrine’s wardrobe, Lara fished metro and bus tickets from her coat pockets, but nothing felt significant and she moved to the bathroom. There was a toothbrush in a bamboo cup on the sink, just waiting for its owner to return. There were headache pills in the cabinet and lotions and potions in the shower. Nothing out of the ordinary. Lara picked up the laundry basket and tipped the contents on the floor, picking out a pair of grey jeans. She pushed her hands into the pockets. A train ticket dated four weeks previously and a crumpled piece of yellow paper. Lara felt her heart leap at the sight of one of Sandrine’s beloved Post-it notes.
She unfolded it and immediately recognised Sandrine’s swirly Gallic handwriting. Three words in black ink, stacked on top of one another.
Helen
Michael
And one other word: Jonathon.
Stella was standing at the bathroom door.
‘Found anything?’ she asked.
Lara held out the note.